Category: Saving The Game

We’re back with another con report! Jenny, Peter, and friend of the show Tyler “Churcher” Denningjoin us to recap Fear the Con 2018, held June 22-23 in Brentwood, MO.

Game rundown:

• Slot 1 (Jenny as GM; Peter; Tyler) – “SIGN: A GAME ABOUT BEING UNDERSTOOD”
• Slot 2 (Jenny) – “THE HORRIBLE THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO CHILDREN: MY COUSIN’S WEDDING”
• Slot 2 (Peter; Tyler) – “DUSK CITY OUTLAWS”
• Slot 3 (Peter) – “BEYOND THE MOUNTAIN WALL: BEYOND THE WALL SYSTEM”
• Slot 3 (Tyler as GM; Jenny) – “CHURCHERS KICKSTARTER TRAVELLER GAME!” (The Twitch VOD can be found here. Note that it is very NSFW!)
• Slot 4 (Tyler […]

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It’s a perfectly normal episode, without guests or con recaps or anything – what even is this? It’s an episode about getting your feet wet as a GM, that’s what! After our usual banter, including Jenny’s sudden appearance in Grant’s D&D game, we answer a question from Patreon supporter Shawn, who asks us about our perfect gaming room. Then we get into our main topic with a variety of suggestions for people considering running their own game for the first time.

Some resources for new GMs: Peter’s “I Want To GM” blog post; Gnome Stew; Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast; Robin D. Laws […]

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It’s time for another bonus episode, `cause we’ve got a convention to recap and gaming news to catch up on! Jenny went to Ottowa Comic Con 2018 this May, and she’s got a lot of stories to tell! Aside from various panels and general geekery, she particularly liked Meeples To Go, Cardamajig’s The Deck of Many (with art by Jordan Richer), Roe’s Art, and Richard Dufault’ […]

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As foretold, once every thirty-three episodes Mike Perna of Innroads Ministries, Game Store Prophets, and Bard and Bible joins us—this time, to talk about board games! Mike takes a moment to plug TavernCon 2018 (June 9th in Warren, NJ.) We also give a bit of a shout-out (belated by the time this episode drops) to the Min/Max Podcast for hitting the one-year mark. Then we take on a question from

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This week, we’ve got not one, but two special guests on the mics with us! Daniel Silver and Father David Subu join us to introduce us to Doxacon Prime 2018! Doxacon is a convention about Christian genre fiction and fandom, and it’s happening November 2-3, 2018, in Washington, DC. (For more information, check out the Doxacon Prime Facebook group, and follow @DoxaconPrime and @Doxacast on Twitter.) You can also hear some recordings from Doxacon and other interviews over at Ancient Faith Radio.

Daniel and Father David have a lot more to talk about […]

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Author, actor, programmer, and preacher Stephen Weese joins us for a fascinating discussion on subculture ministry! Stephen’s book God Loves the Freaks: A Guide to Subculture Ministry was one of the books we read as background material for Saving the Game when we were just starting the podcast, and it was great to finally have him on our show. We covered a lot of ground in this episode, so buckle up!

Our Patreon question this week is from Nathanael Farley, who asks “Which game system do you dislike the most, and what do you LIKE about it?”

Other things mentioned in this episode: The Grave Robbers; The Exodus Adven […]

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Gamer and pastor Tim Decker of Christ Community Etc in Owosso, MI joins us to talk about playing support characters in our roleplaying games, in response to the eternal complaints of players who don’t want to play the cleric! We also discuss how to end a game that’s stopped being fun without any hard feelings, as Grant’s Fellowship group did, and the conclusion of Jenny’s “moidah mystery” prequel to Keep on the Borderlands. We also spend quite a lot of time answering Patreon backer “ComposerDad”, who asks whether gaming groups share the same unifying, cross-subcultural nature of churches. Once that’s done, we dive deep into ways to make t […]

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We’re back with a surprisingly focused episode on sainthood thanks to Jenny’s hard work and research! We’ve only a little bit of off-topic material to discuss: A quick word about the list of questions our Patrons send in, and a brief diversion to discuss Nintendo’s Koi Koi game played with hanafuda cards. We also answer Patreon supporter Tom Stephens’s question about the one place in the world we’d go, if we could go anywhere at all.

After that’s done, it’s time for a deep dive into sainthood. After all, we’d eventually like to do a full series on individual saints and important Church figures; but we figured we’d need a primer on saint […]

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Due to illness, it’s another short bonus episode this week; but Jenny and Peter are talking about Gideon, so it can’t be all bad! Gideon’s a fascinating figure from Judges 6-8, who (like so many others in Scripture) serves the Lord faithfully while remaining familiarly human. His story and character contain some very gameable elements, and we cover those here. Enjoy!

Scripture: Judges 6:11-16, Judges 8:22-25

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We’re back with a discussion of Christian allegory and allusion! This episode, we’re mostly focusing on how this applies to settings, and especially Peter’s ongoing series of setting design blog posts, since the setting he’s creating is designed with allegory in mind.

First, though, we catch up a bit and talk about the games we’ve played! Jenny’s a fan of The Grimm Forest, and talks it up quite nicely. Grant, meanwhile, has a lengthy story to tell about his five-year-old daughter, the card game she designed, and the No Thank You, Evil! “game” she ran for him.

We also answer a question from Patreon supporter “Mister X”, who a […]

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